


in a bondsman's key

by Siria



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fire had been capricious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in a bondsman's key

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sheafrotherdon for reading over this for me!

The fire had been capricious. It took some things and left others according to no pattern Derek had ever understood, not then and not now, walking through dim rooms and looking in vain for signs of Laura’s presence or traces of a recent scent. Half of their home had long since turned to ash, but the stairs that led to vanished rooms were still solid underfoot; the fire had taken the roof from over Derek’s head but left the front door standing in a mockery of protection. His parents, his sisters, his brother, his aunts and uncles and cousins—all were gone, vanished in wolfsbane-tinged smoke along with his uncle’s voice and Laura’s quickness to smile. 

But it left behind small things like this—the old, squat cookie tin that Derek found lying under the table in what had once been their kitchen. It was rusting but otherwise unaffected by the fire, and he prised it open to find the rich scent of metal, a clutter of keys that had nested together unused for years. Derek sat cross-legged on the damp floor and tipped the contents of the tin out in front of him, raking his fingers through them. 

He didn’t know why the sight got to him in a way that walking up to the house for the first time in six years hadn’t—maybe because he’d braced himself for destruction, for ruin, but not for the softer sorrow of abandoned domesticity, the everyday lost things. There were padlock keys for bikes long outgrown; a set of spare keys for the front door that his mom had had cut to be doled out, one at a time, to each kid once they grew old enough to have their own house key; a small, flimsy key, its gold veneer chipped and flaking, that looked like it came from a jewellery box of Cora’s or from the lid of Sam’s piano. Derek remembered his dad hunting through the tin the morning they’d all died, grease-stained fingers seeking the spare key for the tool shed and Derek too impatient to meet up with Kate before school started to stop and help. 

There was a key with a blue plastic cover for one of the side doors, bent slightly out of true, and some older keys which must once have been used for the internal doors, back when his great-grandparents first built the house: the living room, the pantry, the room his mom had used as a study. Some he couldn’t identify at all—ones that his dad might have put in here for safe keeping, a copper one on a cheap UC Berkeley keyring that must have belonged to his mom in her student days. 

And then there was a key for the kitchen door, the door that had hardly ever been locked but which Kate had always knocked at regardless. Derek wondered if that should have been another clue among many, the way that Kate had always kept her awareness of a barrier he thought they’d long since pushed past—the way she’d rested her forehead against his, conspiratorial and cajoling, insisting on silence and secrecy and talking of love in the same breath as she did the importance of bolted doors. 

The keys were all worn smooth from use but had no purpose now—no need to let someone into this space, and Derek had always been bad at keeping people out. By rights he should have just thrown them all away, or put them back in the tin and left them there. Instead, he picked the keys up one by one with trembling fingers, ran his thumb along each ridged blade before slipping them into the pockets of his jeans. When he stood up, they were a perceptible weight, not welcome but somehow necessary—a reminder, like all the small things the fire had left in its wake.


End file.
